Archive for July, 2009

It’s been pointed out to me that lxdream currently lacks mailing lists, and that it might be a good idea to have some. I mean, sure we have the forums, but they aren’t really as convenient as email, are they? So since my esteemed webhost actually has mailman setup and ready to go, I’ve gone ahead and setup the standard lists with lxdream-users, lxdream-dev and lxdream-commit – click here to go to the subscription pages. Mercurial commits are already going to lxdream-commit (albeit HTML-only at the moment, using CVSspam for the notifications)

As of this evening, the public source tree is now being maintained in Mercurial at http://www.lxdream.org/hg/lxdream. The subversion repo will stay up for the immediate future for reference, but won’t receive any more updates. So if you’re following the development trunk, please install a copy of hg if you don’t already have it, and grab the new tree with hg clone http://www.lxdream.org/hg/lxdream

There’s a few reasons to change to a distributed system like Mercurial -

I can commit bits when they’re done, without needing to be online at the time

I can integrate changesets directly from other people, rather than just patches

It’s much easier to test changesets across multiple machines before it hits the public trunk

As for why Mercurial specifically – mainly because I have more experience with it personally, although it does still feel more mature to me than the alternatives at this stage.

I’ve been planning to switch over for quite a while actually, but it’s taken me far too much time to hack hgweb into something at least vaguely usable (it’s still missing a few important things from viewvc, but it’s a lot closer than when I started)

While I’m changing things anyway, I’m also exploring the possibility of moving the entire website into Trac – I’m not 100% convinced yet, but it’s one of the very few platforms that does offer pretty much everything we need in an integrated package (so all the tools would be fairly seamless). Migration will be… interesting though, and probably quite painful.